Twitter is taking the 2010 Fifa World Cup seriously with some exciting enhancements to their service.

When talking about a specific topic on Twitter, users often use what are called “Hash tags”. These hash tags allow other users to click on the words following the # sign to view all discussions on Twitter about that specific topic.

For the 2010 Fifa World Cup, Twitter has added a function to their service that displays flag icons, and a football icon after World Cup related hash tags. So far, we have seen #worldcup display a soccer ball, and each country flag when you tweet each of the hash tags below.

Go ahead and try it out for yourself! At the time of writing, we haven’t seen this working on desktop or cell phone apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic etc, but don’t count out the possibility of this being added very soon.